PS4 Voice Recognition Is Surprisingly Casual

Here's a game you can play on your PS4 without leaving the main menu. 1) Plug a PlayStation Eye Camera into the console or a headset into the controller. 2) Say "PlayStation" 3) And then start naming games you've installed. Important! — > Be playful. Try variations.

I did that and happily discovered that PS4 games appear to be programmed to respond to a variety of versions of their names. Same way I would respond to "Stephen", "Steve" or "Kotaku boss of bosses", more or less.

I first ran the test at home this morning and got the following results for a batch of games:

Need For Speed: Rivals

"Need for Speed" (worked)

"Need for Speed Rivals" (worked)

"Need for Speed Most Wanted" (failed, appropriately enough)

Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag

"Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag" (worked sporadically)

"ACIV" (worked)

"Black Flag" (worked)

"Creed IV" (worked)

"AC" (worked sporadically)

Call of Duty: Ghosts

"Call of Duty" (worked)

"Call of Duty Ghosts" (worked)

"COD" (failed)

"Ghosts" (failed)

Battlefield 4

"Battlefield 4" (worked)

"Battlefield" (worked)

"BF4" (failed)

Lego Marvel: Super-Heroes

"Lego Marvel Super-Heroes" (worked sporadically)

"Lego Marvel" (worked sporadically)

Note how some of those will probably need to be patched out in a year when sequels come out.

I ran this name-game test again at work today. You can hear those results in the video up top. The outcome was a little different and a little funnier. They've even anticipated mispronunciations of some games. Neat.

I now turn it to you, the great people of the internet... test this out on a PS4 of your own and let me know in the replies below if any particularly unusual names work. I'm so hoping that some game developers programmed their games to respond to joke names.

As for Xbox One, I've run similar tests on that console, and it seems that the "Xbox, go to..." prompt requires the speaker to use the full, official name of the game. Anything more casual than that didn't work for me. Again, let me know if your results vary. Add them below.

If you're a little bit more adventurous, you can log the URLs that the PS4 looks at for game/voice pronunciation.

For example, the pronunciations for AC4 can be seen at the following: http://gs2-sec.ww.prod.dl.playstation.net/gs2-sec/appkgo/prod/CUSA00010_00/2/i_a110ff64504963885b07d2a8c28e2df650964d215c635fca7525bfc4211e488b/i/pronunciation.xml

You can see that the following words structures are a possible match: Assassin's Creed Four, AC Four, Black Flag, Assassin's Creed Quatre, AC Quatre ... (might be limited by region).

What will be interesting in the way of voice recognition is when we start to see some Japanese titles that have names that aren't actually real words, particularly with how strict the Xbox One is with it at the moment. Imagine trying to say the name of such games as "Ar tonelico Qoga: Knell of Ar Ciel", "Suikoden Tierkreis" or "Dissidia 012 [duodecim] Final Fantasy".

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